


Rogue

by aintweproudriff



Series: Superhero AU [4]
Category: Newsies (1992), Newsies - All Media Types, Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Abusive Parents, Backstory, Bad Parenting, Childhood Trauma, Guns, M/M, Poverty, School Shootings, Shooting Guns, Trans Male Character, Trauma, a lot of jack's story revolves around him being trans and his transition, jack is a sweet boy who takes no crap i love him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-23
Packaged: 2019-03-21 02:45:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13731471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aintweproudriff/pseuds/aintweproudriff
Summary: Jack's origin story is one of the more difficult to hear. It was even more difficult to live.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's been much too long, superhero au. Oh how I have missed you.

Rogue knew he was lucky to be where he was. New York’s biggest superhero; it was a big deal, and a big title. He hoped he deserved it. Some days, it felt like too much. After all, he’d started as the exact opposite of a celebrity.

-

Jeanine Kelly had been born to parents who didn’t want a baby, and weren’t afraid to talk about it or to display it. They lived in a dingy, barely three-room apartment, where they constantly heard police sirens passing by. It wasn’t uncommon to hear or see something go wrong on that street. Jeanine’s parents had left her alone as much as they could from the day she was walking, only keeping her in their tiny apartment with the intentions of using the “being a parent is so stressful that it drives us to drink” excuse.  
For a long time, Jeanine hadn’t even known it was wrong. All that she’d known was that she slept on the smelly green couch and hid under the much too thin blanket when she heard noises on the street that could have been fireworks or gunshots. All she’d known was that she didn’t complain about what they ate or didn’t eat for dinner, and didn’t go into mommy and daddy’s room if she got scared. That had ended poorly one too many times. 

-

When she’d first realized that there might be a mistake in the way she was living, she was eight. Her parents had done something right that day, and she’d made it to school. Without a lunch to eat, she’d sat in her teacher’s classroom for the entirety of the lunch period. Her third grade teacher had given her half of a sandwich and apple slices and asked about her home situation. 

“Whaddaya mean?” Jeanine asked her, chewing with her mouth wide open. 

“I mean,” the teacher pursed her lips tightly, “are you getting enough food at home? Do you ever go hungry?”

“Sometimes I get hungry, yeah, but my mom says we eat enough.” Jeanine didn’t know why she lied. Something in the teacher’s eyes said that she might get in trouble if she didn’t. 

The teacher leaned forward. “Why don’t you have a lunch today, Jeanine?”

“Left it at home. Thanks for sharin’!”

Jeanine made her voice happy, but her mind spun. Did she get enough to eat? Mommy - mom, she corrected herself, because saying mommy was for little girls - told her that they did. But if she felt hungry at night, was it enough? If she wanted more when her plate was clean, was it?

The teacher coughed and left it alone. “Don’t expect it to happen again,” she told her, but the next time Jeanine ‘forgot’ her lunch, she was passed an apple over the teacher’s desk. 

-

The next time Jeanine realized that something was wrong, she was nine. Her teacher, her fourth grade teacher, had handed her a new book to read. She’d blown through the first one in the series, and luckily the teacher had the first five books in the big bookshelf in the back of the room. 

The character’s name was Jack. Jack could do anything. In the first book, he’d saved a bank from getting robbed. This time, he was a cowboy out west, corralling cows and bandits all the same. 

“I wanna be Jack,” Jeanine had told the teacher. 

“He’s pretty cool, isn’t he?” He had asked the child next to him. “I want to be him too. Maybe you can be, like, a girl version of Jack!”

She didn’t want to be a girl version of Jack. She wanted to be Jack. 

It didn’t take long for her to reach the conclusion: she’d be Jack, and a boy. Jeanine became Jack to the people at school. She - no, he. He would have asked his friends to call him Jack, if he would have had people he played with at recess. So he told the whole class. 

A phone call home was all that that got him. A phone call home and an hour of an angry father and blank faced mother. 

But even after the shouting ended, he really liked the way that the name sounded. He decided he’d rather keep it. 

-

Jack got a job when he was ten years old. He did it on Friday afternoons and Saturdays and Sundays and when he had Mondays off. He faked sick some days to do it too, if he wanted more money. The job was paying. That much he knew for sure. And no one cared if he was Jack or George or Samantha or Jeanine. They cared if he did his work, and did it well. 

Some days, it was hard to do his work. Some days, it meant that he had to fight other kids: some bigger than him, some much smaller. Some days, it meant getting screamed at and spit on and getting a gun in his hand and being told: “use this if you have to, and sometimes even if you don’t.”

But it was money that he could spend on extra treats, like chips and candy. And tape that he could put around the section of his body that just kept growing, no matter how he wished it would stop. His parents, of course, couldn’t have cared less about where he was. Actually, they probably were much happier with him gone. It meant less stress about how many mouths they had to feed. He preferred it too; it meant he didn’t have to listen to the glass shattering when they fought about money. 

His gun was in its holster, just like Jack did in those books he used to read, on one very important day: his eleventh birthday. He’d taken the day off from school so that he could work. With some extra money, he might be able to buy himself something from the little bakery on the corner that always smelled so nice.  
He certainly hadn’t meant to get involved in the fight that broke out. But the trouble had found him, as it seemed to do. When he saw his boss, the person that was supposed to pay him that night, hit the man who was holding the hand of another man, he nearly screamed. And then, when he was watching the ensuing fight, he had made an impulse reaction by pulling the gun out of its holster and firing it into the crowd that had gathered. He’d blindly hit his mark: his boss’s foot. And as blood poured out of the man’s foot and drained from his angry face, Jack ran. He ran as far as he could, as fast as he could, not risking it to look and see if people were following him. If they were, it was bad news. If they weren’t, they would soon. He didn’t have the luxury to go slowly. 

His heart raced in his chest by the time he was at least a mile away, and decided he could slow down. A tall, elegant, white building on the side of the road caught his eye. On a whim, he climbed the steps and pushed the door open. 

The ceilings were higher than the ceilings at school. There were more pillars, too. No one was in the front of the building, so Jack let himself wander. The only sound was the shuffling noise that his feet made as he walked. It would have been all too easy to get lost in there, if he hadn’t turned a corner and found himself, quite abruptly, at the waist level of a woman. 

“Oh!” she turned around. “Hello! What are you doin’ here?”

“I, uh,”

“Are you lost?” she bent down to ask him. “Do you need help?”

“I guess I’m lost,” he said, “but I don’t really wanna go back out there.” He shuffled his feet. 

Her dark eyes grew worried. “What’s your name, kid?”

“I’m Jack!” 

“Okay, Jack. My name is Medda. Why don’t you wanna go back out?” she touched his arm gently, guiding him to the side of the long, wide, empty hallway. 

“‘Cause if I go back out, I have to go home. And I don’t never wanna see my mom and dad again. And I don’t wanna deal with my boss, too.”

“You have a boss?” she whispered. “How old are you, Jack?”

 

“I’m ten.”

She closed her eyes and looked towards the ceiling. “Ten years old and you have a boss. The things that happen in this city.” And then she opened her eyes, looked at him, and raised her voice. “What are your mom and dad like?”

“They’re, well. They’re okay, I guess,” Jack said. He couldn’t have said why he was being so honest with Medda. He just felt like he could be. 

“Why do you not wanna go back there?”

He laughed a little. “They don’t like having me there.”

“And what gives you that idea?” she leaned forward, her eyebrows hiding her eyes. 

“They tell me so.”

“Oh,” Medda sighed. “I’m sorry, Jack. Do they know where you are now?”

“No. They’ve got no idea,” he shook his head and lowered his voice so that it didn’t catch the echo he’d heard in this hallway. “And I’m gonna keep it that way.”

“I see. Jack, what do you think about superheroes?” she asked.

He didn’t blink before answering. “I love superheroes! You mean like Cheetah-man and The Emerald?”

“I mean exactly like those,” Medda said with a wide smile. “How would you like to be a superhero?”

“That’d be so cool. I already know what my powers would be!”

“Oh yeah? What would they be?” she grinned. 

He straightened his back. “I would be able to hear and see stuff from far away, and I’d be able to fly, and shoot laser guns.”

“Hm,” Medda pursed her lips. “Let’s see what we can do about that.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A quick flashback to add to Jack, Davey, and Crutchie's backstory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My superhero au fics are always the ones that fewer people read. They make me so happy, though! 
> 
> Here's what my cat had to say to you when he stepped on the keyboard as I was uploading this: 89655555555555555555555555555555556666666666666666666666*9888888888888888/

Jack was nineteen when he thought that he had it all. Being a superhero was, well, super. He’d made the joke enough times to expect to get slapped on the head when he said it, but he meant it every time. Every day, Jack got to work with strong, talented people who had real drive to keeping the world safe from evil. Even little evils seemed to matter: it wasn’t just big-time bank robbers and shoot-em-ups or alien invaders. The things that they fought were everyday. They were the kittens stuck in trees, the kids who got their lunch money stolen, the lost little boy who wandered into a building much too big for him and ended up finding a home. 

Medda had gotten him out of that hellhole of an apartment, of a life. She had given him somewhere to sleep, something to eat, and a place to learn how to be the best superhero he could be. She did make him stay in school, though. “At least graduate high school,” she told him. “You never know when something might happen, even to someone with superpowers, and you need a job. Savin’ the city doesn’t always pay the bills.”

He had rolled his eyes at her when she said it, but looking back, high school was his favorite part of his life so far. The classes he took, the friends he’d made, even the books he had read were honestly life changing. Medda swore he worked a little harder to protect the city in his sophomore year after his class read To Kill a Mockingbird. Maybe he had. Stories like that were enough to keep a person on the right track, enough to make them believe that humanity was worth protecting. Jack had learned a lot in school, to his surprise.  
What shocked him the most, however, wasn’t how much more educated he became, but the kind of people he met. When he was young, all he had ever known was meanness. Parents were mean. Kids were mean. Even teachers were mean. But in high school, things were different. It could have been that Jack himself was a different boy when he started high school, it could have been that nobody knew his past at his new school, but people were nice to him at the beginning of his freshman year.  
On the first day of school, when David Jacobs somehow decided that Jack looked non threatening enough to sit with in Honors Biology, Jack had a gut feeling that this friendship could be important. At lunch, Jack found the only other kid in the superhero agency sitting alone at a table. Crutchie Morris, the boy who could fly, was also a freshman. He and Jack had become fast friends at work and often did little missions together. David - Davey - joined their group soon after, and the three of them got on like wildfire. Sophomore year, they were dating by Christmas. It was a shot in the dark. No one expected it to work out. By graduation, they were still together, by no miracle at all. They had never once had cause to break up, not even through all the awkwardness of first relationships. Not even in eleventh grade, when David found out the secret that Jack and Crutchie had been hiding. 

~

“Superheroes?” he asked, much too loudly for Jack and Crutchie, in the middle of the lunchroom. Juniors who still sat in the lunchroom: the three of them had never been cool, anyway. “Like Rogue, and Reyna, and Captain Cannon?”

“Be quiet,” Crutchie hissed. “Let’s go to the bathroom.”

David’s eyes furrowed, but he stood up, grabbed his bag, and made like he was going to the cafeteria bathroom. 

Crutchie shook his head. “Not that one. The one upstairs, the one no one goes into.”

The three boys walked quickly, trying to pretend that they had a purpose, in order to get past the security guards. It was lucky that they weren’t caught, and made it to the empty bathroom. 

“You’re - you two are trying to tell me that you’re superheroes?” Davey asked, his voice still hushed. 

“Yeah, Davey,” Jack raised his eyebrows.

David sniffed, like he couldn’t breathe. “I don’t believe you.”

“Why do you think we’re gone from school so much?” Crutchie asked. 

“And never able to hang out after school?” added Jack. 

It was like Davey couldn’t move. Didn’t want to move, maybe. “I don’t know. I figured you’re busy, that you were-”

Jack laughed loudly. “Busy? Yeah, busy being awesome!”

Crutchie hit his side playfully. “We’re really sorry we didn’t tell you, Davey. We wanted to, I promise. But hey, if you didn’t know, and you’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever met-”

Davey started to shake his head.

“-don’t do that, you are,” Crutchie pointed at him. “Then I think our secret’s safe from other people at school.”

Davey took a deep breath. “Why tell me, then, if you haven’t before? I mean, if you wanted to and you couldn’t, then what made today different?”

“Medda,” Jack told him, assuming that would explain everything. At his blank stare, Jack expanded more on what he’d said. “Medda, my adoptive mom, she runs the superhero agency. You met her a while ago? She’s a superhero too, she’s Reyna.”

Davey’s jaw went a little slack. Jack smiled and kept going. 

“Yeah. She’s Reyna, I’m Rogue, Crutchie’s Captain Cannon.”

“Wait, what? You’re seriously Rogue and the Captain?” Davey’s eyes looked ready to pop out of his head. 

Crutchie nodded matter-of-factly, and David released a tiny surprised laugh. 

“When she met you,” Jack told Davey, “we asked her if we could tell you. And at first, she said no. And then we kept asking and asking and asking, and she met you again, and she decided that we can trust you. That's such a big deal, by the way,” he reached out to Davey, "she doesn't trust a lot of people after just two meetings."

“Plus,” Crutchie said, tilting his head, “you were going to find out soon anyway. You hadn’t already discovered us, but you were beginning to wonder, y’know?”

David shuffled his feet. “Yeah, that’s true.”

The lunch bell rang to tell them that they had five minutes to get to class. Jack grabbed David’s hand and the three of them had made their way, as quickly as possible, to biology. 

In class, David leaned over to Jack. “So,” he asked with a small devilish smile, setting his pencil down on the table, “can I come see the agency?”

“I was kinda hoping that you’d ask that,” Jack grinned back. “You can come over today if you want.”

~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and for leaving comments, they mean the world to me!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there's a lot of gun violence and mentions of guns and school shootings in this chapter. If that's going to be an issue for you, please don't read this!   
> Spot's backstory was written a long time ago, and I don't change it because I think it's necessary for the plot and as a way to talk about the issue in a fictional work. I also don't change Jack's weapon use because I think his "cowboy superhero" idea is important to his character arc. Please note that his use of guns does not reflect my own personal values.

Jack was 16 when he had met the boy who would become one of his best friends, and most important coworker. The two of them had met in junior year of high school, when Sean “Spot” Conlon had transferred to Jack’s school. Spot spent every day, before and after school, in the weights room of their school gym. Jack had been doing the same thing, to practice before he went to actual training with Medda. On one day, Jack’s set had been harder than anticipated, and Spot had helped him push the bar up one more time before Jack collapsed on the ground. The two of them quickly became partners in there after that, spotting and encouraging each other when they got to particularly heavy sets.   
Spot was a good kid: nice, strong, completely quiet in all of his classes. Jack noticed how jumpy he was, however, when they were in math class together and Jack saw Spot jump nearly every time a door slammed. He didn’t ask about it for a long time, not until they had been working out together for a few months. Jack brought it up on the last day of the semester, and found Spot’s response devastating to hear: his school had been shot up the year before. He’d been in the classrooms of the same building, and heard shots being fired into rooms full of people. The shooter had broken into Spot’s classroom and fired. Spot wasn’t hit, but he was sitting up against the wall next to someone who was - his closest friend. When he finished talking about it, Spot didn’t say much, but Jack got the basics of the story. It was a story Jack could understand, psychologically. Spot had seen his best friend killed, and the only way he knew to deal with it was to work and get stronger. There was a look of regret in Spot’s eyes as he spoke. Maybe he desperately hoped that next time, he could save someone from getting so hurt. 

Jack hated that he recognized the look that Spot wore. It was the same look worn by many of the older superheroes he had known, a look of constant regret of not having done more to save people in danger. But Jack recognized more than the look, he recognized potential. It took him a few weeks to bring up the idea to Spot, but he was excited about it when he heard it. It meant that Spot would be able to do something to help people, and he wanted nothing more. Together the both of them got it cleared by Medda. Spot kept training, but he also began going into the agency to be experimented upon by Davey, whose new formulas were intended to give people legitimate superpowers. Despite the trials that Davey had run previously all going downhill, Jack’s boyfriend was still rearing to get his serums into people’s blood, to make a difference in the world. These serums worked, and Spot developed powers of heat and strength, and became Sunspot. Jack kept training him, and the two worked well together. Not as well as Jack and Captain Cannon did, since those two had been working together for years already, but they were still a talented team. 

Jack would never forget the first mission that he and Sunspot did together. It was supposed to be relatively simple; a villain that Rogue and the Captain had defeated a week ago had some henchmen who, in their anger at the defeat, decided to cause some trouble around town. It would be a clean up, really, of the mess they had made, and making sure they didn’t make any more. Sunspot, in his new super-suit designed to resist the flames that he now knew how to produce, took off from the agency in a hurry. Rogue was much more relaxed, almost like he was going to the store to get milk, not save the city from disastrous invaders. When Rogue caught up with Sunspot, the new recruit was already fighting henchmen. They were skinny men, all of their faces yellowed in the way that only tobacco can make a person look. Ironic, really, that smoking had almost killed them and now a boy with the power of smoke and fire was here to catch them. Spot sent flames flying towards the ground where the men stood, every injustice and every fear scrawled on his face. Rogue remembered the feeling well; he could still feel it rattle his bones if he tried hard enough. The temptation to let whoever you were fighting feel all the pain you wanted to inflict on people who had hurt you before was strong. Jack understood it. For a second, he let Spot have his moment. Then, he broke in, forcing Sunspot to slow down the flames until they came to a stop. He cuffed the guys and brought them out from the shadow of the alley, where Agent Larkin was waiting as backup in case it went poorly, but also with a cop car for when the mission was over.   
They hadn’t expected that these guys would have backup too. They hadn’t expected that someone would grab onto Sunspot from behind, shocking him enough that he didn’t even think to use his powers. He struggled to break free, and Spot was strong, but the man’s grip was too tight for him. Agent Larkin nearly stepped in, but Rogue was faster. He pulled his gun out from his holster and fired into the leg of the man holding his partner. The bullet wouldn’t be enough to kill him, or even enough to injure him for a long time. It was only enough to surprise him initially, and then it would send strains of a knockout serum - Davey’s invention - into his bloodstream. Of course, the villain didn’t know that. He thought he’d been shot for real, and reacted like it. Apparently, Spot didn’t know that the bullet was a fake either. Once the henchman let go, Spot fell to the ground, burying his face in his hands and facing the concrete, his breathing shaking his entire body. A second passed. To Rogue, it seemed silent. In reality, the police siren in his ear was deafening. 

“Is the gun away?” Spot spoke, his voice small. 

Rogue’s heart broke at the question. “Yeah,” he managed to say. “Yeah, it’s away. You’re alright,” he grabbed Sunspot’s hand and looked him in the eyes as he helped him up. “You’re safe.”

“Okay,” Sunspot nodded. “I’m okay. And, uh, I’m sorry. That was pretty lame,” he said, getting his footing steady on the concrete. “I knew you carried a gun, I just didn’t really expect to see one, you know?”

“I’m sorry I pulled it out,” Jack told his friend, pulling him away from the scene and into the shadows again, as the police shoved the men into the back seat. “Man, I knew you wouldn’t like it but I just-”

“Nah. You did what you had to do,” Spot took a deep breath. All the rage in his face from earlier had disappeared when it was replaced by fear. And then by relief. “I didn’t like it. I don’t like staring down the barrel of a gun, and I’ve had too much experience with it. But you’re Rogue, you know? You’re the cowboy superhero. It’s your thing.”

Rogue laughed. 

Spot coughed, rubbing his fingers over his knuckles, scratched from the concrete. “Maybe we can come up with some kind of code or something? Might help me to know what’s coming a little better.” 

“Sure, yeah,” Jack nodded. “We’ll work on that.”

-

Now that he was older, Rogue was out in the city every day, saving lives. Even when he didn’t save people, he was giving interviews on television or giving speeches at meetings or helping little kids to stand up to their bullies. Rogue was the hero that Jack had always wanted, the hero that Jack had always needed. And Jack felt an obligation to keep being that hero. He wanted to bring hope to people who didn’t have any, to help people who felt helpless, and to save kids who were just like he had been as a kid. Who were just like Spot.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Come say hi on tumblr @allbesolucky or @javidblue, and make sure to tell me what you thought of this with a comment!


End file.
